Compliance kept lawyers busy. What comes next will define whether customers trust you with their data — or walk away for good.
The moment a brand asks a customer for their data is one of the most important interactions in the entire customer relationship. Get it right, and you earn their trust. Get it wrong, and you lose a customer who likely won’t come back.
For years, that moment was treated as a legal problem or something to hand off to compliance and forget about. That era is over. In the age of AI, data consent has become a brand issue, a growth issue, and, increasingly, a CMO issue.
The “Trust Gap” Is an Opportunity in Disguise
Consumer trust in data practices is eroding at exactly the moment brands need it most. A recent EY study reveals that 55% of consumers worry that organizations will fail to comply with their own AI policies.
The brands that move first to close that gap with transparent, well-designed data experiences are building a competitive moat that’s very hard to replicate.
A recent MIT Insights report notes 44% of consumers say transparency about data use is the single top driver of brand trust, ranking above security guarantees and even the ability to control data sharing. In other words: transparency isn’t a compliance cost – it’s the foundation your personalization and AI strategy is built on.
Also Read: Hyper-Automation Is Over. Agentic AI Is What Comes Next.
Why CMOs Are Positioned to Solve This Problem
The most common disconnect I see is in organizations where both legal and marketing want to build trust but define it in entirely different ways. Legal measures success in compliance rates. Marketing measures it in engagement and retention. Without a shared framework and unified KPIs, those teams end up optimizing against each other. Privacy-led UX touches legal, product, IT, and data operations, and the CMO is the one function with visibility across all of it. That makes closing this gap a CMO job, whether it’s on the org chart or not. The CMO can be the one to bridge that gap.
Good privacy UX at its core is good brand UX. Consider how brands like Zalando approach it. They use phrases like “tailor your privacy settings,” which align with their fashion identity and audience. Similarly, Porsche frames data controls around “full control,” putting customers in the driver’s seat figuratively as well as literally. Both of these are examples of intentional brand decisions that signal privacy is a core part of how the company treats its customers.
AI Everywhere Makes Privacy an Urgent Matter
If the business case for privacy-led UX isn’t compelling enough on its own, AI has changed the stakes entirely. In a recent Forrester survey of privacy professionals on the ROI of their privacy programs, the second most common answer after regulatory compliance was enabling AI adoption. Put simply: you can’t scale responsible AI without the privacy infrastructure already in place.
The need for comprehensive privacy becomes even more critical as agentic AI moves from concept to deployment. Unlike generative AI, where users make conscious choices about what to share, agentic systems act on a user’s behalf. Agents can make bookings, purchases, and data-sharing decisions without explicit input at every step. The traditional consent moment, as we used to know it, may never occur.
Also Read: AI Is Supercharging Returns Fraud. Retailers Are Behind.
The New Mandate
The window to get ahead is still open. CMOs have always been in the business of building brand equity, and how a brand handles data is now inseparable from that equity. The organizations that invest in consent infrastructure today will be well-positioned when the regulatory and competitive environment tightens further. The ones that don’t will have a hard time catching up. The difference comes down to a simple mindset shift: treat privacy as a relationship to be managed, not a disclosure to be made.